News, notes, and anecdotes on the Fort Wayne TinCaps

Statistical Oddity, Six To Go, Fortune 500

Here we are with just six days left in the regular season. My, how time has flown. The TinCaps pulled out one of their best wins of the season last night at Lansing, scoring six unanswered runs and overcoming a four-run deficit for the win. Prior to last night’s game, the most the team had trailed by in a game they had come back to win was three runs. The TinCaps also had a season-high 18 hits, all of which were singles. It’s now been 11 games since they’ve hit a home run but, hey, if you can win with 18 singles, you take it.

Statistical note: The odds of having 18 hits and all of them singles in one game is incredibly low. Here’s the math (which I figured out with a little…OK, a lot of help):

This season in the Midwest League there have been 18, 218 hits. 3,722 doubles, 607 triples and 1,355 home runs. Subtract that from the total number of hits and you’ve got 12,534 singles. The total number of singles divided by the 18,218 hits shows that 69% of all hits have been singles this year. So if you multiply .69 (69%) to the 18th power, you get 0.13%. Nearly one tenth of one percent.

Travis Jankowski also comes into today’s action with an 11-game hitting streak. In just 53 games with Fort Wayne Jankowski has had hitting streaks of 10, and now 11 games. Over

In today’s TinCaps Report Podcast, I talk with Sandy Alomar, Sr., who is working these days as a roving instructor in the Toronto Blue Jays organization. The longer one stays in baseball, the smaller the baseball world gets. As it would happen, Alomar was the third base coach in 2007 when Valentin was playing for the New York Mets:

Valentin credits Alomar with keeping him working hard and staying motivated, even in the final year of his major league career. Here is my conversation with Alomar, who is 68 years old and still throws batting practice with the energy of a 35-year-old:

“You can only control how your guys play,” Jankowski said. “And if the other teams win, it’s kind of out of your control. It’s fun, exciting and nerve-racking all at the same time.”

FORTUNE 500 FOOTBALL

Here’s a great story via Grantland, about a university that hired a football coach who had never previously coached a Division 1 team. Joe Moglia, a former TD Ameritrade executive, is now the head coach at Coastal Carolina, which opens its season on September 1st. It’s an interesting move, to say the least, on Coastal Carolina’s part, to take someone who has plenty of leadership experience, but little football coaching experience, and install him as the head coach of a program.

“Stripped of context, Moglia’s hiring seems unorthodox at best, and an outrageous display of cronyism at worst. In this moment, in the midst of a national argument about the role of money in society and the fitness of a CEO to translate his skills into other fields — not to mention the cloud of ethical lapses in both industries Moglia is associated with — here is a story that sweeps everything into a single narrative. It is only natural to raise questions about how this happened, which is why I showed up on campus in early August, and which is why there are people with ties to Coastal Carolina University (and those with ties to David Bennett especially) who have translated Coastal Carolina president David DeCenzo’s unorthodox change of direction into something dark and suspicious. These people have made the presumption that Moglia was hired in order to pay for a new baseball field or a new Astroturf practice field on campus, that he was hiredbecause he is rich and not because of the way he got rich.

This will be an interesting story to follow, not just to see how Moglia does as a head coach, but also to what the reaction will be to his performance in his first season. Generally a coach will be given three to four years, so that he can bring in his own recruits and coach them through to their senior season, but it’s certainly looking like there will be more scrutiny on someone with a Wall Street background.

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